Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco

by Calvin Trillin

Book Overview

Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the "continental cuisine" palaces he used to refer to as La Maison de la Casa House. What he treasures is the superb local specialty. And he will go... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375759964
• ISBN13: 9780375759963
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Food Writing Without the Recipes

One of the things I like about Trillin is that he is not a cook. There are no recipes in this book. Although I do enjoy reading food books by people who cook, it's nice to get the view from an unadulterated eater now and then. Trillin uses this book to highlight foods that he can't get at home in Manhattan, and that is a list that is getting shorter all the time. In fact, you can get exotic foods almost anywhere now. And that is just why he has a hard time luring his daughters back to New York from the West Coast. They can get New York bagels and anything else in California. I love Trillin's dry humor and skepticism. This is my first Calvin Trillin book (although I have enjoyed his magazine essays) and I'm looking forward to reading his past works.

A Delicious Book

I have a soft spot for food writers. Maybe it's because I enjoy a good meal, perhaps too much, but I think it's because I've found food writers to be charming in their obsession with food related minutiae. No one is more charming than Calvin Trillin whose "register of frustration and deprivation" leads him to travel the world seeking those foods that he can't live without. the result of this is Feeding a Yen. I can't put this book down. He's like an adventurous and kindly uncle. It's a treat.

*munch* *munch* *gulp*

I began reading The New Yorker in college, back in the early `60s -- mostly for the cartoons, I admit, but it wasn't long before I discovered the often witty and always beautifully written essays of Calvin Trillin. As a food-lover, I especially enjoyed his culinary pieces, since collected in three volumes beginning with American Fried in 1974. The last, Third Helpings, appeared in 1983, so it's been along dry spell, but now he's back with a new series of adventures that will make you salivate. The chapter in which he tries to get his daughter to promise she'll move back to New York from San Francisco if he can find a dependable source of pumpernickel bagels makes him sound Manhattan-centric, but he also writes a paean to boudin (which, even living in south Louisiana, I confess I don't care for at all), and another to the posole found in Taos (which I like very much). And there's a chapter on nutria sauce piquante that's a real hoot (think sheep-sized rodents). And there's San Francisco burritos, and Casamento's oyster loaf, and fried fish in Barbados, and pimientos in Galicia, and a number of other foodstuffs to be considered. This is a great book to read when you're sitting in the staff room at work, munching mindlessly on a homemade tuna sandwich and a bag of Fritos.

A Delicious Book About Simple and Honest Food

The United States is a nation covering more than 3.5 million square miles, measuring nearly 2,800 miles from Battery Park in Manhattan to the Santa Monica Pier just west of Los Angeles. According to current Census Bureau figures, more than 290 million people live in the U.S., most of whom don't have to trace their roots back too far to find relatives who arrived on American soil from elsewhere. As a nation we are a diverse and interesting bunch. But if you look at what we eat, it is apparent that the great melting pot has been simmering for perhaps too long and is now yielding an increasingly bland porridge. From sea to shining sea, a nation populated by people from all points of the globe has become a gigantic, generic food court that threatens to erase the vast national cornucopia of ethnic eats and local treats. It's a creeping culinary crime that, if left unchecked, may one day turn the entire planet into an Applebee's. But all is not lost.FEEDING A YEN, the latest effort from the prolific and always entertaining Calvin Trillin, offers an escape for those who have grown tired of food that has suffered a spectrum of indignities, from gentrification to generification. Each of the fourteen chapters in FEEDING A YEN covers a different local specialty, from pumpernickel bagels in New York City, to pimientos de Padron (a dish made with tiny green peppers) in Galicia, Spain, to boudin (a kind of Cajun sausage) in New Iberia, Louisiana, to ceviche (a cold fish soup) in Ecuador --- and plenty more along the way.If you're looking for a book on pricey eateries, find something else to read. FEEDING A YEN is about simple, honest food, often made from recipes that have been passed down for generations. In describing these various treats and his efforts to find them, Trillin exhibits a palpable glee, particularly when skewering some of the more pretentious aspects of the business of feeding people.In a chapter on Napa Valley wines, Trillin plays on his own ignorance of the vintner's art as he investigates a test that reputedly proves that even the experts can't really tell a red from a white. Another chapter deals with the good-natured squabbles within a Web community that has emerged via chowhound.com, a Web site devoted to ferreting out great ethnic food in the neighborhoods of New York and Los Angeles.If you're a fan of Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour on the Food Network, you'll enjoy FEEDING A YEN. Trillin and Bourdain share a passion for the food purveyed in small shops and by street vendors. But Bourdain, who apparently will eat just about anything, has the more adventurous palette. The various treats Trillin describes are often exotic, but never involve anything that you'd keep as a pet or that might buzz around your porch light on a warm summer night. Trillin writes about good, simple food, food rooted to specific locations by tradition as much as by the availability of the necessary ingredients.Technology has made the world a much smaller place. M

better than XO Sauce

I read this book on a recent trip to Los Angeles, where I regrettably realized that Nate and Al's in Beverly Hills had better whitefish salad than Murray's in NYC. When Calvin Trillin would visit his daughters in California, he used to take a dozen or two bagels with him from NYC, to tempt them back to the capital of authentic bialys and appetizing stores from the Southern California wastelands of sun dried tomato and bee pollen bagels. What can one make of a world where a London fish and chips salesman uses matza meal to batter coat his fish, San Francisco style burritos are sold in Manhattan, NY Bagels are in LA, and great Chinese food can be found in Paris? Calvin Trillin, in a series of essays ("Magic Bagel", "Grandfather Knows Best", "Chinatown, Chinatown", etc), takes the reader on a very funny and enlightening trip around the world, as he finds the best local foods. My faves were, he eats Chinese from Paris to Prague, he searches for the bagels of Hyman Perlmutter's Tanenbaum's bakery, and he explores the fish taco.